Transforming experience into writing

Transforming experience into writing is the narrator’s attempt to give linguistic form to an abortion that had remained difficult to name and difficult to leave behind. The project is not simply a record of past events: it makes writing answer to the bodily, temporal experience it recounts, then asks whether that experience can become intelligible beyond the self.

A reciprocal demand

The writing project begins with a paired wish: “I wish for two things: that happening turn to writing, and that writing be happening”. The two movements are inseparable. An experience must become language, but the act of writing must also carry something of the force of an event. Writing is therefore neither a transparent transcript nor a detached explanation; it is meant to bring the past into active relation with the present.

That ambition is bound to the narrator’s fear that the story might remain unwritten. A week after beginning it, the narrator is still unsure whether to continue, yet recognizes the urge as the same one that had seized her when she began another book two years earlier. The impulse feels frightening, but so does the prospect of dying without having acted on it. In a dream, she holds a published book about her abortion, absent from bookstores and catalogues, its cover marked “OUT OF PRINT.” The image gives the writing project two opposed futures at once: a book that exists, and a book that seems already unavailable. The narrator cannot decide whether the dream urges her to write or declares the effort pointless.

Writing as investigation

The decision to continue becomes a form of inquiry. The narrator wants to enter that period of her life again and discover what remains there, treating narrative as the form capable of transcribing an experience shaped by time flowing both inside and outside the body. The aim is not to impose a ready-made interpretation on the past, but to recover its particulars closely enough for words to emerge from them.

The materials for this investigation are concrete. A diary and an engagement book kept at the time can establish dates and provide evidence of what happened. Yet documentary accuracy alone is insufficient: the narrator also intends to revisit each remembered image until she feels physically bonded to it and can find words that seem exact. This method joins external traces to embodied recollection. Dates anchor the account; images and remembered sentences retain their differing charges, some unbearable and others consoling.

The return of memory

Writing does not proceed in a straight line from memory to finished account. During the project, a dream returns the narrator to 1963, when she was desperately trying to obtain an abortion. On waking, she recognizes the despondency and helplessness of the original experience. The dream makes the past present again, but it also threatens the possibility of representing it: for a moment, she concludes that the book is doomed.

The narrator compares what writing might accomplish to the split second of orgasm, when the “heart of things” is reached. In the dream’s logic, the experience has already expressed itself spontaneously, without the labor of composition, leaving the literary undertaking apparently superfluous. But that conclusion does not hold. The impression passes, and the urgency to write grows stronger because the dream has confirmed, rather than replaced, the need for the book. Recollection thus acts as both interruption and impetus: it renews the force of the experience while making its translation into language more necessary.

Completion and transmission

At the book’s close, the narrator says she has finished putting into words what she regards as an extreme human experience, one bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics, and taboo, and one that sweeps through the body. The breadth of these terms does not detach the account from its personal origins. Rather, the conclusion insists that these questions were encountered through a lived bodily event and that writing must preserve that scale of experience.

The narrator identifies a particular guilt: not simply that the abortion happened, but that it happened to her and she did nothing about it by recounting it. Writing answers this guilt by turning what had seemed like a discarded present into a narrated past. She becomes certain that the events happened so she might tell them, while presenting this certainty as a way to make sense of her life, not as an externally proven purpose. Her proposed vocation is to make her body, sensations, and thoughts into writing: something intelligible and universal, capable of allowing her existence to merge with the lives and minds of others. The movement from private memory to shared language is therefore the project’s ending and its measure of success—not erasure of the past, but its passage into other people’s understanding.